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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

This is something you don’t see every day. Courtesy of my always-on-top-of-things colleague John, here’s a look at the process by which Danish government authorities are selecting an EMR for the Capital Region of Denmark.

As the TBKConsult blog notes, this is a big decision. The authorities expect to spend 135 million euros on the EMR, which will have 40,000 IT users and need to support up to 12,000 clinical and administrative users at 17 hospitals and 54 other healthcare institutions simultaneously. Once installed, the system will support a region serving 2.5 million patients.

Once chosen, the EMR will be implemented with a pilot in the Capital region and eventually, by the end of 2016, rolled out throughout Eastern Denmark.

The selection process has already narrowed down the list of possibilities to five prequalified vendors: Systematic, Epic, Cerner, Cambio and Siemens. None of the vendors have submitted official proposals yet.

What’s interesting about this isn’t the shortlist, but the means by which the authorities have decided to narrow the list down. Here’s their list of fourteen criteria by which TBKConsult expects them to do so:

TBK Consult has also ranked the importance of each of these criteria, assigning the most weight to “Fit for purpose-clinical processes” (25 percent), “Fit for purpose-PAS” (15 percent) and “Fit for purpose-external integration” (15 percent). They rated “Implementation capability” at 10 percent and most of the rest of the criteria at 5 percent.

By their weights and ranking, vendor Cambio comes in first, Systematic second, Epic third, Cerner fourth and Siemens fifth. Intriguing. I wonder how close TBK will be when the actual results are announced?